In this translation by Julie Rose, Victor Hugo's 1862 masterpiece Les Misérables is given a full, unabridged presentation. This epic of crime, punishment, justice, and redemption—written while Hugo was in self-imposed exile during the reign of Napoleon III—sweeps from the French provinces to the back alleys of Paris, from the battlefield of Waterloo to the bloody ramparts of Paris during the uprising of 1832. Rose has received the PEN medallion for translation and the New South Wales Premier's Translation Prize. Adam Gopnik provides the introduction, as he has also done for editions of Maupassant, Balzac, Proust, and Alain-Fournier.

"Julie Rose's new translation of Les Misérables is very well done. Vibrant and readable, idiomatic and well suited to a long narrative, it is closer to the captivating tone Hugo would have struck for his own contemporaries."—Diane Johnson